When Tito Loved Clara by Jon Michaud

the windows of the upper floor and planks on breeze blocks for a stoop. A Dumpster had occupied the short driveway for as long as Tito could remember. If progress was being made on restoring the house, it was all happening on the inside, because the outside was as derelict as it had been when their fathers were friends. In Tito's imagination, the house had, over the years, anthropomorphized into a giant, decapitated head, its chin on the sidewalk, the garage an open mouth, the windows above them like a pair of eyes, and the boarded orifices on the top floor some kind of pagan headdress. As Tito watched Clara walk across the street, it seemed like the house was going to swallow her alive.
    W ITHOUT HAVING TO be told, Tito understood that the Friday afternoon walks home with Clara would be a secret—not just from their parents, but also from their schoolmates, from his friends. He could tell no one. The romantic lives of the Almonte girls spurred endless speculation among the boys (and, he guessed, the girls) of John F. Kennedy High School. The speculation filled a void. There were rumors of the Word Club girls going on dates with Columbia students and New York Presbyterian doctors, of limousines and downtown nightclubs, of trips to resorts in the Poconos or long skiing weekends in Vermont, but these were merely rumors, never substantiated. The only certainty was that they did not date boys from Kennedy. If Tito had claimed that he was Clara's boyfriend, no one would have believed him; he would have succeed only in attracting ridicule or, perhaps, pity. During the school week he could presume no change in Clara's attitude toward him. In short, he could not expect her to acknowledge his existence beyond sharing her amusement with her friends about the boy who sometimes followed her in the halls. He was fine with this. It was a small price to pay.
    The next Friday was Good Friday—something Clara may or may not have realized when she issued her invitation the week before. It was a half day. He waited for her by the U-Haul lot, figuring she wouldn't want to be seen near the school grounds with him. He positioned himself there immediately after the final bell rang and was still there well after the time when he had run into her the week before. Rain threatened and he sensed the disapproval of the people passing by: He must be up to no good. Still she did not appear. Maybe she'd gone to church or something? It was then that he realized there would be no school the following week because of the Easter break and that he would not see her for at least ten more days.
    Those ten days passed slowly. He worked a move on the Saturday, a family relocating from a shitty apartment on Nagle Avenue to a slightly less shitty apartment on Fordham Road. Sunday he went to an early season Yankees game with his cousin Hershel. Hershel attended George Washington High, but Tito refrained from telling him about Clara, just in case the rumor leaked back to Kennedy. During the week off he helped his father. He repainted a vacant one-bedroom apartment by himself; he hauled the mounds of trash out to the curb for the weekly collection; he unclogged a drain for Mrs. Canby on the fourth floor. When his father sent him out to buy a new faucet for the Hernández family in 2G, he momentarily thought of going down to Dyckman and buying it from Clara's father, just on the off chance that she was working. But his own father would never forgive him.
    On the Monday after the Easter break, Tito saw her in the hallway, walking by herself between classes, and was relieved to learn that she still existed. She appeared to take no notice of him until she was almost past and then, at the last moment, she winked at him. It was so quick that anyone seeing them might have thought she got something caught in her eye. But it was enough.
    That Friday—it was mid-April already—he waited for her closerto the school, standing outside a bodega in the weak spring